It seems that Jane Eyre has an introverted personality, because she is happiest when alone, "With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way." However, if Jane was not surrounded by people who were so cruel to her she might not be happiest alone. It seems that Jane wishes to escape the troubles of reality by hiding in the window seat and indulging in literature. She favours books with pictures, perhaps because they make her fantasies more vivid. She is fanciful and imaginative, as indicated by her talk of ghosts and imps and other such mythical creatures in Chapter 2, " tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp," However, she is also aware of the reality of the situations she finds herself in, and she does not disappear completely into fantasy.
Jane seems very morbid for her age, as she thinks about death and even considers starving herself, " never eating more, and letting myself die." These thoughts are unusual for a ten-year-old girl, so clearly Jane must have had a particularly rough childhood up to now. Jane reads about bleak things, such as the coast of Norway, of which she quotes,.
"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, .
Boils around the naked, melancholy isles-.
But actually she finds pleasure in this sort of writing, perhaps because she can relate to it because it illustrates her feelings. Chapter 2 suggests that Jane has little self-esteem, as she thinks that she is a heterogeneous, useless, noxious thing, and she seems to feel inferior to the other children of the house who get nothing but respect and admiration, "Why could I never please?" Jane has the sort of angst that children don't usually experience until puberty, as she has all sorts of desperate questions rolling around in her head, including the question of why she is always suffering and why she is always accused.
